


what is inside the body is more body

by postcardmystery



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 16:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1785880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Ought I to slaughter to your precise instructions?” he asks, and Caliban leaves him with a scar not unlike one of his own, thin and winding around Victor’s wrist. </p><p>Victor stitches it himself, black thread sliding through his skin, and barely feels the pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what is inside the body is more body

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for violence, murder, a brief mention of suicide, and some detailed references to organs/body-snatching, etc.

Victor never saw himself as a father.

That, after all, is why he has so many brothers, healthy and strong and as foolish as his pater’s beagle pack, a crowd of voices speaking as one, trying to call Victor out into the light. Victor is pale, and sickly, and weak. No, not weak, exactly, but not robust. As a child too thin, as an adult too thin; as a child isolated and prone to breaking bones, scraping his knees, long fevers in the winter never quite sweated-through by the summer, as an adult underfed and overworked, white as one of his corpses. But he is what he is-- and what he is, as he told Ethan Chandler once, is difficult to comprehend.

But what he is not, is--

“Do not dare call yourself my _father_ ,” hisses Caliban, close enough that Victor can feel that strange warmth beneath his fingers, “You have done naught to earn the title. Naught, and less, creator mine.”

\--what he is not, is a father.

 

 

He gave up everything for his work. Everything. His father lost all hope of his son making a suitable marriage some years ago, which Victor has managed to mitigate only by making advances so important his father cannot understand the meat of them, only that they will bring renown to the name Frakenstein. Victor learnt when very young, what his father cared for. Primary amongst those cares: not Victor.

“I wish I had no father,” he tells Sir Malcolm, on a dark night, and it’s a weakness, the brandy he never drinks loosening his tongue, “I am quite sure that he feels similar. We have been nothing but disappointments to the other, he and I.”

“I have not been much of a father,” says Sir Malcolm, and Victor knows him well enough by now not to argue that point: he has not.

“But I would be the first to admit that I see much of worth in you,” he continues, and Victor smiles at him, instead of replying.

Victor would be the first to admit that Sir Malcolm might well be the first to have done so, ever.

 

 

“Do you want me to kill for you?” he whispers, and he does not know what he fears more: a _yes_ , or a _no_.

“Is it really so difficult to do what I ask that you must try to trip me up with moral conjecture?” says Caliban, and Victor lets himself snarl, as he must do something.

“My life requires death,” he says, “Perhaps I should take the way of Judas Iscariot and leave you instruction. Why must your mate be a female, after all? Or would you fear my sack of bones would retain too much of the essence of Victor Frankenstein, eh?”

“I do not want a mate with your face,” says Caliban, simply, and Victor restrains himself in increments, does not mention his twin.

“I was not serious,” says Victor, and he wasn’t, would never trust another to operate his machinery, as they both know quite well. However, it does not remove the sting.

 _I would kill to have you love me_ , Victor does not say.

“Ought I to slaughter to your precise instructions?” he asks, and Caliban leaves him with a scar not unlike one of his own, thin and winding around Victor’s wrist. 

Victor stitches it himself, black thread sliding through his skin, and barely feels the pain.

 

 

Victor was born in a thunderstorm, lightning the first sound he ever heard. His twin, three minutes younger, came into a world where the sun broke through the clouds, and birds began to sing.

According to Victor’s father, he never quite recovered from the thunderstorm. 

According to Victor’s mother, he was born with lightning in his veins.

Victor knows that somewhere, in the ocean between them, lies the truth.

 

 

“What a peculiar scar,” says Dorian Gray, and does not drop Victor’s hand.

Victor has many scars now, and they are not all from Caliban. Bullet-wounds and knife slashes, marks from beatings and from falls. They have rendered his face ugly, by any conventional understanding of the word. He was never much concerned with beauty, and it does not bother him, and there is a poetic justice in it, perhaps. The creator coming, over time, to resemble his creation.

Dorian slides his thumb over the scar on his wrist, the one Caliban made.

“It is so much older than your others,” he says, and Victor pulls his hand away.

“I know what you are doing,” Victor says, because he is no man’s fool, and Dorian laughs.

“I know an invert when I see one,” says Dorian, and leans in, his lips pressing hot and wet and so, so alive against Victor’s mouth, “As, I am sure, do you.”

“I do not think there is a word for you,” mumbles Victor, against Dorian’s lips, and he laughs again.

“No, I think you are quite right about that,” he says, and Victor, finally, finally, pulls away.

“I cannot,” says Victor, and Dorian frowns.

“You kiss as if a stranger to it,” he says, “Was my seduction too unwieldy?”

Victor knows he is not beautiful, and he knows that Dorian is. Dorian pulls women, men, into his orbit like one of those African flowers, the ones who eat their prey. He could probably refuse for that alone, claim that Dorian is carved from marble and he has scars on his face which are yet to even heal, but it is not the reason. 

“My heart belongs to another,” he says, and Dorian scrunches up his face in disgust.

“True love,” says Dorian, “Gosh. How quaint. Does he know it's his to possess, your heart?”

“Not since his was mine,” says Victor, and does not mention how it felt to hold it, still and cold, in his hands.

 

 

“We are monsters,” says Ethan Chandler, and his hands are limp on his pistol. 

“Give me the gun, you fool,” says Victor, and wrests it from Ethan’s hand.

“She’s just a child,” says Ethan, his eyes wide with horror, and Victor hisses, “A child who just took most of my sternocleidomastoid muscle with her!”

There is so much blood smeared on Victor’s neck his shirt collar is entirely red. The girl will die, because she must die, because they cannot cure her and if they do not gift her with death then another will die at her hands. Pragmatism. It suits Ethan Chandler, but not in every light. Victor was born to darkness.

“We are not monsters, Mr Chandler,” says Victor, “On the contrary. We are so much more.”

When he pulls the trigger, he is so steady. A surgeon’s hands.

 

 

“I am cursed,” says Caliban, and cocks his head. “Perhaps not. Perhaps that assumes a god, which I will not. My birth sheds such petty notions of creation. You are no god, Frankenstein, if creation is the only requirement.”

“God is kind,” says Victor, although he suspects that God is no such thing.

“Then, that too excludes you,” says Caliban, and Victor cannot help it-- he laughs.

“What about my words could possibly amuse you?” says Caliban, the threat of violence naked in his voice, but Victor no longer fears him. The world is full of too much to fear, and it has long since washed over him, a black wave which has drowned him so many times it has no power remaining.

“I was merely thinking of how you and my father would agree on my character exactly,” he says, and Caliban narrows his eyes.

“So you, too, had a cruel father,” he says, and Victor swallows, then, because there is a truth, there, and he can no longer hide from it.

“I am not your father,” he says, “I--I awoke you, perhaps. But you are not my son. The current fathered you, not I. I was midwife, only.”

“You cannot hide from your responsibility in such petty ways,” says Caliban, and-- again.

Caliban is beautiful. Victor has never created something beautiful. The gap there, the bridge he cannot cross.

Well. He’ll burn that bridge when he crosses it.

 

 

He loves Vanessa most of all of them, if love is the right word.

She is more his sister than any sibling he’s ever had, the dark smudges beneath their eyes betraying them kindred, so often mistaken for brother and sister by strangers, so often they have used it as cover, many times. Vanessa, his older sister, who talks to spirits and makes the earth shake and speaks in Latin, a language only he, of their household, understands. Her Latin is of the divine, St Michael and the archangels, how the devil claws his way out of Hell. His Latin is precise, medical, diseases and bones and blood. Somewhere, deep down, they share the blood. 

“The cleverest man in London,” she whispers, gore up to his elbows and a smile on his face and a vampire screaming under his hands.

“She is more powerful than Victoria,” he snarls, as an idiot at one of her seances tries to touch her, thinking her mistakenly in pain.

He is the only man who touches her, suturing her wounds, brushing her long, dark hair. She is the only woman who touches him, brief gentle hands sometimes glancing over the marks a not-man made.

“What are you hiding from me?” she says, ever kind, ever cruel, the board laid out in front of them, wearing her predator’s smile.

“No more than you,” he says, and waits to see which of his pawns she’ll take.

 

 

It takes Victor many months to understand that what he feels roiling off Ethan in waves is not entirely hatred. It comes to him in little pieces, the feeling of Ethan’s hand around his waist, seeing Ethan fight, realising that Ethan barks before he bites, because it is all he knows.

“I am not going to fuck you,” he says, matter of fact, one grey autumn afternoon, and Ethan chokes on his soup.

“Who says I was askin’?” he says, when he has finished choking, and Victor treats him to an anemic smile.

“Please do not make me play this game,” says Victor, passing him his handkerchief, “There is no shame in it. It is only a body. It is of no interest to me what you do with yours.”

“You actually don’t give a shit, do you?” says Ethan, eyeing him, and Victor laughs, says, “Well, it would make me rather a hypocrite, Mr Chandler, wouldn’t it?”

“Young man in the picture, then? Ain’t seen any round,” says Ethan, and he means well, Victor is sure, but.

“Not quite,” he says, and eventually Ethan shrugs, returns to his soup.

(Not quite _young_. Not quite _man_.)

 

 

The young are so fallible. Victor knows his mistakes, now, owns them, wears them on his skin, beneath his shirt and trousers and his shoes. He could not love his first creation more if-- see, he cannot even finish the sentence. He would laugh in God’s face, for preferring humanity over Lucifer, Eve over Lilith. The first, and cruellest, they are always best. Nothing supersedes your first love.

The night Caliban almost-realises is an ugly thing.

He has Victor pressed against the wall, his hand around his throat, and all Victor can think is _yes_ , _yes_. His cock is so hard he almost cannot breathe. He is as still as he can be, but--

“You wish to possess me?” says Caliban, his face contorting in confusion.

“I-- I do not--” says Victor, but Caliban drops him, disgust clean on his face.

“I would wager a great deal the only hands you have ever known are your own,” says Caliban, and he’s laughing now, and, and, “I did not believe you could become lesser in my eyes, yet here we are.”

“I cannot help my physiology,” says Victor, and when Caliban spits on him, it is hardly even a surprise.

 

 

There is a thunderstorm tonight.


End file.
